Medecins Sans Frontières – Human Ball is a well made, and haunting video that attempts to illustrate the severity of the AIDS crisis in Africa. The issue HIV has been shelved to a back room of public consciousness in the USA; Americans don’t like to think uncomfortable thoughts. But the problem isn’t going to go away, and it isn’t limited to Africa.
But there is no doubt that the crisis has reaced staggering proportions in Africa. Avert.org, speaking of the Sub-Sahara area, says that an estimate of “24.5 million people were living with HIV at the end of 2005 and approximately 2.7 million new infections occurred during that year. In just the past year the epidemic has claimed the lives of an estimated 2 million people in this region.” I don’t think the “human ball” of the video exaggerates the problem; if anything, it understates it. An even scarier picture was presented at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto in August 2006.
But what gets to me is the way a lot of people expect to combat this. What I “hear around” most is that it’s a problem of education. “If people knew the danger, they would use protection, or abstain from sex.” There is a billboard campaign in my area, showing happy faces and stating something like, “They know,” with a little subtitle showing it to refer to HIV testing. As if knowing about it is going to make it go away, or even change the way people live. Well, like many things, it’s not that simple.
Some month a go, NPR interviewed a care worker, who in turn had talked to some African men about HIV AIDS (Sadly, I cannot find the transcript on the NPR site, there are scores on the topic). When he spoke to them about protection, or about being less promiscuous, they basically laughed at him. They considered free sex their one joy in life, and they were willing to risk all the rest rather than give it up. Lack of education is not the problem. Hopelessness, despair, and a crushing cycle of poverty and oppression are. We are speaking of nations where people make their living from the city dump (both consuming discarded food, and selling rich people’s trash); where governmentstake farms away from skilled owners (because they are white) and give them to people who don’t know how to run them, and so trash the nation’s economy; where wars and genocide still rage on. You almost can’t blame them. They think at least they will die happy … that they are going to die, and that not of a comfortable old age, is to them a given.
I would be willing to bet that Africa is not the only place where attitudes like that prevail. The darkest inner cities of America are probably no different. Countless countries in this world we never hear about; how fares it with them and their poor? Despair is a universal thing, and like that human ball, it will grow larger and larger as more are trapped within it. What are we doing about that?
What can we do?